This is the online version of the latest UNU-MERIT I&T Weekly which is sent out by email every Friday. If you wish to subscribe to this free service, please submit your email address in the box to the right.

US and British intelligence agencies illegally hacked into a major
manufacturer of Sim cards to steal codes and facilitate eavesdropping on
mobiles, according to the US news website The Intercept. The company
allegedly targeted - Gemalto - says it is taking the allegations 'very
seriously'. It operates in 85 countries and has more than 40
manufacturing facilities.

The Intercept says that 'the great Sim heist' gave US and British
surveillance agencies the potential to secretly monitor a large portion
of the world's cellular communications, including both voice and data.
It says that among the clients of the Netherlands-based company are
AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint and around 450 wireless network
providers around the world.

The Intercept claims that the hack organised by Britain's GCHQ and the
NSA took place in 2010. The stolen encryption allowed the agencies to
decode data that passes between mobile phones and cell towers. They were
able to un-garble calls, texts or emails intercepted out of the air.
Gemalto makes Sim cards for mobile phones and furnishes service
providers with encryption codes to keep the data on each phone private.

By first cyber-stalking employees at Gemalto and then penetrating their
emails, the spy agencies were able to steal thousands of encryption keys
at source. This would allow them to eavesdrop easily on phone calls and
texts without seeking permission from telecoms companies or foreign
governments, and without leaving a trace, according to the Intercept,
which cites as its source documents leaked by former NSA contractor
Edward Snowden.

If you must preserve messages for people in the far future to read,
Blu-ray discs and USB sticks are no good. For real long-term storage,
you want a DNA time capsule.

Just 1 gram of DNA is theoretically capable of holding 455 exabytes -
enough for all the data held by Google, Facebook and every other major
tech company, with room to spare. It's also incredibly durable: DNA has
been extracted and sequenced from 700,000-year-old horse bones. But
conditions have to be right for it to last.

Researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich are
working on ways to increase DNA's longevity, with the aim of storing
data for thousands or millions of years. They began by looking at the
way information is encoded on a DNA strand. The simplest method treats
the DNA bases A and C as a '0' and G and T as a '1'. Of course, any
damage to the DNA leaves holes in the data, so the team used an
error-correcting technique called a Reed-Solomon code. This includes
redundant blocks that can be used to reconstruct garbled bits of data.

They also tried to mimic the way fossils keep a DNA sequence intact.
Excluding all water from the environment was key, so they encapsulated
the DNA in microscopic spheres of glass.

To test how long this storage system might last, they encoded two
venerable documents, totalling 83 kilobytes. DNA versions of these texts
were kept at 60, 65 and 70 °C for a week to simulate ageing. They
remained readable without any errors. The results suggest that data in
DNA form could last 2000 years if kept at a temperature of around 10 °C.
The Global Seed Vault in the Arctic could preserve it for over 2 million
years at a chilly -18 °C, offering truly long-term storage.

A 24-year-old Brazilian student has created a portable medical lamp that
kills antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

The inventor, Caio Guimaraes, studied electrical engineering at Brazil's
Federal University of Pernambuco. His device consists of a lamp, which
emits light at a blue wavelength that has been shown to kill bacteria,
and biodegradable microneedles. These penetrate the skin's outer layer,
or epithelium, and act as mini optical fibres that conduct light towards
infections below the skin.

The lamp has been tested on bacteria such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa,
Klebsiella pneumoniae and Acinetobacter baumannii, which cause skin,
lung and stomach infections and have a high resistance to various
antibiotics. The device has won awards from Harvard University and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US.

Spider silk is famous for its amazing toughness, and until recently a
tensile strength of 1.3 gigapascals (GPa) was enough to earn it the
title of strongest natural material. However, researchers report that
the record books need to be updated to properly recognise the incredible
strength of the limpet teeth.

Marine snails known as limpets (Patella vulgata) spend most of their
lives scraping a set of small teeth along rocks in shallow ocean waters,
looking for food. The constant grinding would be enough to quickly
reduce most natural materials to nubs, but the limpets' teeth boast a
tensile strength of between 3 and 6.5 GPa, researchers report.

The scientists discovered that the teeth are made of a mixture of
goethite (an iron-containing crystal) nanofibres encased in a protein
matrix. In spite of their amazing strength, the teeth don't quite best
the strongest humanmade materials like graphene, but the new material's
upper range puts it far ahead of Kevlar and on par with the highest
quality carbon fibres.

Researchers speculate that the material's durability may have practical
applications in dentistry.

A new nanostructured material makes it possible to replace bulky lenses
and other optical devices with a thin sheet of material such as silicon.
The advance could make it possible to shrink some professional-quality
camera lenses to the thickness of a credit card. It might also enable
lighter-weight, more compact full-colour holographic 3-D goggles.

The work was inspired a year ago when Google approached Federico Capasso
from Harvard with a challenge. He'd recently demonstrated that he could
build thin, nanostructured films that could manipulate light. The films
worked well with only one colour, and Google wanted to know if he could
make the technology work all the colours needed to produce full-colour
displays.

One problem with most optical materials is that they bend light of
different wavelengths at different angles, which makes it hard to
produce clear images in a camera. It's possible to correct for the
problem, but that involves adding extra lenses, which is why the
high-end lenses professionals use are so bulky.

Capasso's team found ways to make all the wavelengths bend at the same
angle. It's long been known that you can produce ultrafine patterns in a
sheet of metal, or some other material, that will split light up into
different colours the way a prism does. Capasso found that varying that
pattern at the nanoscale in a precise way causes light of three
different wavelengths to bend at the same angle. The end result is the
ability to manipulate light using very thin materials.

Binoculars are handy but they can also be bulky, heavy and a pain to
carry around. But imagine if contact lenses could be made to magnify
images and serve as tiny, wearable binoculars. Swiss and US researchers
are working on just such an optical prosthetic, with funding from the US
Defence Department.

The device is a very thin reflective telescope inside a rigid contact
lens just 1.5.mm thick. When worn with a special pair of glasses, the
effect is said to be like looking through a pair of low-magnification
binoculars. The lenses let you switch between normal vision and a view
that's magnified nearly three times with the wink of an eye. The glasses
help the contacts distinguish between intentional winks and involuntary
blinks.

The technology could be worn on healthy eyes. But it's really designed
to help the visually impaired, especially those with age-related macular
degeneration. If the system succeeds, it could offer a non-surgical
option to help improve failing vision.

'Your honour, we don't know if the suspect is the killer, but we do know
they both used Revlon Frost & Glow hair dye.' It sounds absurd, but a
well-known chemistry technique could help authorities identify criminals
based on their artificial hair colour.

Usually, hairs left behind at a crime scene are associated with DNA
testing, but such a procedure requires whole, intact hairs and is often
time-consuming. Because of these constraints, forensic analyses
sometimes simply compare the appearance of the hair under the
microscope, but these comparisons are subjective in nature and
frequently inconclusive.

However, new research might eventually provide police with a DNA-free
method for objectively linking a hair to a crime. The technique uses
surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) to precisely measure how
light from a laser bounces off a hair. Vibrations within the molecules
on the hair's surface change the energy of the reflected photons and are
caught by a detector. If the sample has a dye on it (or blood, drugs,
ink, explosives, etc.) the laser will reflect differently, and each dye
creates a unique pattern.

The technique is so precise that scientists are able to identify
distinct brands of dye and determine whether the dye was temporary or
permanent-even when sampling a microscopic piece of hair. Furthermore,
because SERS is fast and doesn't destroy the sample, if a chemical does
link a hair to a crime scene, the sample could potentially still be
analysed for DNA at a later point.